Letters

On the English working class

I am not going to launch a polemic against Andrew O'Hagan in the way he did against the English working class ("The age of indifference", 10 January), even if I did find his article objectionable and inaccurate. I will confine myself to challenging some of the assertions and "facts" he cites in his castigation of what he confusingly refers to as "his people".

First, he writes: "Thatcher is said to have been genuinely shocked by the ease with which England rolled over ... England lost its unions and nationalised industries without a blink." This ignores - for a start - the miners' strike, the Wapping strike, the Brixton riots and the Toxteth riots. It also ignores an array of other protest responses, such as the alternative comedy revolution, pop music from the Smiths to the Beat ("Stand Down Margaret") and the vast numbers of working-class people who voted against Thatcher.

Second, he writes: "The English working class are far ahead of every other European lower class in the sheer energy of their indifference." Any kind of supporting evidence for such an extraordinarily sweeping statement might have made this more convincing.

Third: "The statistics show that English football fans abroad will still turn to violence faster and more regularly than any other football fans in the world." Which statistics are these? Incidentally, the English have a lot to learn from the Scots about violence - a United Nations report in 2005 showed Scotland to be the "most violent country in the developed world".

Fourth, he writes: "Orwell would have rolled into the towns of England on a Saturday night to examine why people were so quiescent, demoralised, so fearful of outsiders, so drawn to fantasy and spite and so lacking in purpose as a social group." Orwell would probably have produced some kind of factual observation to back up such an assertion.

Fifth: "Depression among children of the poor is recorded as the worst in Europe." O'Hagan doesn't cite the source, but he presumably has in mind the Centre for Economic Performance report published recently - which refers to British, not English, children.

Sixth: "The underclass is the most conservative force in Britain." Is there any evidence for this - from a breakdown of voting rolls, for instance?

Seventh, he writes that "in some quarters" the English working class is "fascistic". Is it really so uniquely full of "spite" as O'Hagan asserts? In 2007, police figures were published for 2005-06 that showed 5,124 racist crimes in Scotland. Given that the population of the rest of the UK is 10 times greater and contains five times as large a proportion of ethnic minorities, this is proportionately a far higher figure than in England. Incidentally, extreme religious sectarianism of the sort that scars the Scottish working class is more or less unknown among the English white working class outside of a few areas of Liverpool. Also, according to figures cited by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, one in four gay people have suffered violence in Scotland.

Eighth, he writes: "As we have seen in the banking crisis, the English people call for sedation, not sedition." As opposed to the anti-capitalist rioting that took place on the streets of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff?

He refers to "the English arrogance which resides in the view that they are naturally dominant in the British Isles". But the English are naturally dominant - 84% of the British Isles is English, 8.5% Scots. It is Scottish arrogance that finds this simple - and neutral - fact so painful to acknowledge.

I could continue at length. Suffice to say that it is no news that the English working class are disenfranchised, depressed and apathetic - for the same reasons the working class everywhere are, including in Scotland. The end of manufacturing industry, the decline of the unions, the break-up of working-class communities through increased mobility and reckless town planning, the concentration of the elites on ethnicity, gender and sexuality issues, rather than class, being the primary reasons.

The difference between the English and the Scottish working class is that the Scots can take pride in their nationality without being accused of being Powellite or racist. And so the English working class remain uniquely isolated, and abandoned, not cushioned, as the Scots are, by a victim's sense of belonging to an "oppressed" group, along with enjoying greater investment in health, education and social services than their English counterparts.

The English working class must thus continue in its marginalisation and sufferance of middle class "spite" (O'Hagan's word) of the kind one can find in the Daily Mail most of the time.Had I written an article of similar length on the shortcomings of the Scottish working class, I would have been inevitably castigated as racist, ethnocentric, or imperialist. Also, I would have probably got ma heid kicked in.Tim LottLondon

I'm English and I agree with Andrew O'Hagan. I lived in Scotland in the 1980s and I had a good view of the English decline from over the border. Thirty years on, the future for the once dominant English is that we will have fat wannabes and drunken debt junkies throwing their weight around forever.Ian D SmithWestbury, Wiltshire

Andrew O'Hagan's fine article has many pre-echoes, including Bertolt Brecht writing from Denmark in February 1939 to congratulate Karl Korsch in America on the publication in London of his book, Karl Marx (Chapman and Hall,1938): "How splendid that it was produced by the most defeated of all proletariats." Nicholas JacobsLondon

Andrew O'Hagan's stimulating essay on the English working class takes its cue from a particular interpretation of English history set out by the leftwing thinkers Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. It relies on an international framework of comparison. Compared to say, Italy or France, England has recently been free of large-scale uprisings - the miners' strike and the poll tax are small beer in that continental context. The interpretation has in fact a longer time-frame: such thinkers have never quite forgiven Britain for its moderate political history over the past couple of centuries - it doesn't inspire them.Olivia GriersonLondon

Andrew O'Hagan relies on an all too familiar stereotype of the working class as feckless, lazy and complacent. His nationalist prejudices are obvious enough, but the condescension of O'Hagan's argument runs deeper than a detrimental view of the English. O'Hagan fails to credit the orchestrated unmaking of the working class. His argument, in fact, is a mirror image of the problem he identifies. The claim that the working class don't do anything is reflected in the implicit assumption that nothing has been done to them. These are two sides of a voluntarism which leaves out any mention of the active political process of disinheritance.Steven GroarkeLondon

There's a long tradition of blaming the victim in western culture, and what a fine job Andrew O'Hagan makes of it. Perhaps he left the working class so long ago he's forgotten that grindingly hard work for little reward tends to engender a certain fatalism: that "indifferentism" is a defence mechanism, and not a sign of moral depravity. Perhaps he thinks that being unemployed leaves plenty of time for protest, rather than yet more struggle, trouble, and damaged self-esteem. The most risible argument O'Hagan makes is that the working class somehow connived in its own political and economic emasculation by Thatcherism. It wasn't ordinary working people who campaigned for the abolition of skilled manual work, trades unions, and the welfare state. That task was performed by the class whose solipsism O'Hagan appears to have acquired. Inequality damages everyone: a point his article amply demonstrates.Andrew LawsonBradley, West Yorkshire

The decline of the working class? O'Hagan could have mentioned the fall in manufacturing jobs, but what was the most decisive blow to the notions of community and solidarity? He singularly failed to mention the miners' strike. Millions of people gave donations, marched in demonstrations and, despite the best efforts of the TUC, participated in sympathy strikes. Even despite that and other defeats (Wapping, GCHQ, the docks) it was the mass community resistance of the anti-poll tax movement that finally felled Thatcher. Yes it's true that class consciousness is a different beast, there has been the creation of a permanent "underclass", the Lottery has become the route to salvation and strikes are almost non-existent. But the end of the working class? Exactly the same argument was advanced from a different perspective in the "never had it so good" 1950s.Richard KnightsLiverpool

I read Andrew O'Hagan's piece on my way to a very large central London demonstration about events in Gaza that featured many English trade unionists and their banners and leaders - Scotland had a separate protest. I suppose it does no harm to re-hash the Anderson-Nairn thesis of the mid-60s that the English working-class is uniquely useless and weighed down by a grey labourism, provided that EP Thompson's wonderful riposte is also recalled - that while things in "other countries" may seem better, the English working class, far from supporting or benefiting from British imperialism, has a long and creditable history of opposing it.Keith FlettLondon

It was unfortunate for Andrew O'Hagan that his article announcing the death of the English working class appeared in the same weekend as the British Darts Organisation world championship reached its annual climax at the Lakeside. This very public display of friendship, generosity, and good humour, from players and supporters alike, puts 180 tiny holes into his case.Stephen AlexanderHounslow

Strong women in Narnia

I fail to understand the view of Philip Pullman, reported by Jenny Turner ("Through the wardrobe", 10 January), that the Narnia books contain "misogynistic ... prejudice". Most of the books' heroines - Lucy Pevensie, Polly Plummer, Aravis Tarkheena and Jill Pole - are attractively independent, brave and tough. As for the "dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs", well, it's true Lewis was being a bit cruel to plumpness there, but these girls are not "dismissed by Aslan's procession" - they run away from it of their own free will (leaving behind one girl who prefers lions and maenads to stifling chalk and talk). And a bunch of "pig-like" boys who are tormenting their (female) teacher get it in the neck (turned into pigs), so there's no anti-female bias there.Peter CaveStockport

Candaules and Gyges

Charlotte Higgins ("The rest is history", 3 January) mentions the use of the haunting story of Candaules and Gyges in The English Patient, but not the highly effective deployment of it by Anthony Powell in Temporary Kings, where it illuminates aspects of Widmerpool's relationship with his disturbing wife, Pamela Flitton, and the reader's voyeuristic relationship with the events and characters of the story.Ann CaldwellEdinburgh

Literary butlers

To your list of literary butlers (Ten of the Best, 10 January) might be added those created by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Galleon in A God And His Gifts and Bullivant in Manservant and Maidservant (among others) exhibit powers of wordly-wise perspicacity and sturdy eloquence that even Jeeves might find it hard to beat on a good day. These butlers, far from having to advise on the colour of spats, keep their ears cocked behind half-closed parlour doors for evidence of misdemeanours of a much graver kind by their masters and mistresses.RP BlowsLondon

Bring back the depot

Michael J Smith is right to point out (Letters, 10 January) that the Westfield mall is built over the site of the original Central line depot, and that the White City was on the other side of Wood Lane, but providing visitors with a route from Uxbridge Road to the White City were the Franco-British Exhibition Halls - long, narrow sheds on stilts built in 1908 and designed to last five years. They were still standing almost 100 years later, until the coming mall required them to be demolished.Nicholas RoyleManchester

• Send letters to Review, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. review@guardian.co.uk Letters may be edited for reasons of space. Please include a postal address.

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.